Preface to Les Diaboliques

The preface to this famous collection of tales authored by this Frenchman, as included in the first edition.

Here are the first six stories!

If the public bites and finds them to its taste, six more will then be published because in total they are twelve, twelve mistresses of sin!

Of course, with the title of Diaboliques, they could not possibly pretend to be a book of prayers or of Christian imitation.  They are nonetheless lush with true observation, however daring, and have been written by a Christian moralist who believes – and these are his own poetics – that great painters can paint anything and that these paintings are always both moral and tragic; from them will inevitably emerge the horror of the things they describe.  Only the impassive and the mocking are truly immoral.  And the present author, who believes in the Devil and in his influence upon the world, is not mocking anything at all and has no purpose in recounting these tales to those of pure soul other than to terrify and repulse them.

Once the public has read Les Diaboliques, I doubt there will be anyone who will wish to read it again, which is exactly what comprises the morality of a book.

That said as a matter of honor, we should answer another question.  Why has our author bestowed such a sonorous name upon these plain and dirt-strewn tales?  Is Diaboliques a bit too much?  Was the name chosen only for the stories included here or for the women at their core?

Alas, all these tales are true.  Nothing was invented or devised, we simply could not name the actual people involved!  They have been masked; and in these masks we can perceive the outline of their dresses.  "The alphabet belongs to me," said Casanova when he was reproached for not using his name.  The alphabet of novelists is the life of all those who have experienced passion and adventure, and it is only a matter of combining the letters of this alphabet with the discretion of profound art.  Moreover, despite the necessary precautions at the heart of these tales, there will undoubtedly be some among us whose attention will be attracted by the title Diaboliques, and who will not find them quite as diaboliques as they seem to boast of being.  They will expect inventions, complications, research, refinements, and all the shaking and trembling of modern melodrama (which is taking hold everywhere, it seems, even in the novel).  But these charming souls will be sadly mistaken!  Les Diaboliques are not devilries, they are truly "the diabolical," real stories of our progressive age and of a civilization both so delicious and divine that when we dare to describe them it always seems that they have been dictated by the Devil himself!  The Devil is like God.  Manichaeism, the source of the great heresies of the Middle Ages, might not be quite as stupid as we thought.  Malebranche said that God can be recognized by employing the simplest of means possible.  The same can be said of the Devil.

As for the women in these stories, why wouldn't they be the titular Diaboliques?  Are they not sufficiently steeped in diabolism in their own person as to deserve this gentle moniker?  Diaboliques!  There is not one of them here who is not diabolical to some degree; there is not one of them here whom we might seriously address with the words "my sweet angel" without fear of exaggeration.  Like the Devil – who was once an angel himself but fell irreparably – if they are angels then they are angels in his image, their heads lowered and the rest on high!  There is not one of them here who is pure, virtuous or innocent.  Monsters even, at least to some extent, they represent a collective of good sentiments and morality of precious little consideration.  Thus they could also have been called Les Diaboliques without really earning it.  We would have liked to create a museum of these ladies – as we wait for an even smaller museum of those ladies who are their counterparts and their foils in society, because all things come in pairs!  Art has two lobes just like the brain.  Nature resembles these women who have one blue eye and one black.  Here is their black eye in blackest ink, in the ink of those of easy virtue.

Perhaps later on we will publish something on their blue eye.  After Les Diaboliques, why not Les Célestes if we can find a blue of sufficient purity ...

But does such a color exist?

Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY

Paris, May 1, 1874

Tieck, "Herbstlied"

A Romantic poem ("Autumnal song") by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Once toward this field a bird did fly
And sang in mirthful sunshine pure.
With wondrous, sweetest tones it cried:
"Come forth and leave this soft allure!"
So I'd depart by end of day.

When heard I rapt the field-strewn lyre,
Then joy and fear both took their hold;
O happy pain, O dampened fire!
My ardor rose to fall back cold.
Does pain or joy my heart then flay?

So as I saw the leaves descend
I knew that Fall at last had come.
No summer guest, the swallow's end.
What will then love and lust become?
So fast, so fast, makes time its way.

Yet summer's sun returned again,
As did the bird I once espied.
And gazing at my tear-strewn mien
"Love knows no winter," it replied,
"Spring's shown its face, fear not this lay."

Immortal Beloved

If you were to ask most culturally aware people what they know about this renowned composer, you might learn that he wrote his last symphony (which they will inevitably hum) while deaf, a feat perhaps as awesome as the composition of this work by a blind man of incomparable genius.  A few might mention the wild mane of hair which would come to symbolize poor grooming but great thinking in our cerebral portraits of mad scientists; others, prone to that most American of obsessions, lists, might involve him in a mysterious brotherhood called the Three Bs.  Still others might allude to his manic desire to control his destiny – but might miss the fact this can be said of any first-rate artist with ambition.  Another motif arises in a novel reviewed earlier on these pages, that of the inability to change what must be ("Es muss sein").  There are countless other myths and romanticizations about Beethoven, and many more yet to be invented, but one theme, one Goethean red thread runs through them all, and that thread is fate itself.  I have always believed that artists – be they composers, writers, or painters – are some of our most pronounced fatalists.  To some degree this can be imputed to an indefatigable faith in their own abilities, that redemption and history will eventually look upon them with the same awe that Philistines and yes-men swoon over the popular contemporaries of every man and woman of genius.  These contemporaries vary in skill, but they all put out an inferior product because they know that the most offensive thing one can do to another person is call him too stupid to understand.  Beethoven was famous in his time, but he was also reviled by lesser lights for his superior ability and uncanny ease in his work.  If Bach sublimated polyphony to a distant corner of the sky and Mozart rendered (with a few too many notes, said his, ahem, contemporaries) a simple quilt of sound enchanting, fresh, and delightful, it was Beethoven who remained the purist of all.  He wrote about every poetic passion and his music supported his findings, from the Moonlight Sonata to Eroica to his final work, one of the recognizably magnificent pieces of music the world has ever heard.  But he was also a man; and men, especially creative, moody and impassioned men, need love as much as they need oxygen.  Which brings us to this lush tribute to the mysteries of the human soul.

We have seen this story line before, and we will see it again.  Ludwig van Beethoven (Gary Oldman) has died, buried before thousands who sensed that the earth might never again see a musician of his caliber (they were right – with one exception).  And so, in the weeks following his death, his secretary Anton Schindler (Jeroen Krabbé) has the unenviable task of putting the master's papers in order.  Unenviable not only because they are disorganized and unattended, but also because when an admired or loved one leaves us, we have little energy for filing or discarding mementos.  Amidst what must have comprised hundreds of pages of unfinished music, Schindler comes across letters in Beethoven's hand that bequeath all the composer's earthly belongings – as well as something much dearer to him, his heart – to a certain female, named only as his "immortal beloved."  As Beethoven's love affairs were neither too few to promote unambiguity nor too many to render such a determination impossible, Schindler takes it upon himself to discover the truth at all costs.  The rest of the film follows Schindler, a resolute but artistically obtuse man, to a handful of European capitals for the company of some lovely candidates from society's upper echelon, all of whom could have released the fumes of Beethoven's final inspiration.   Along the way we are subjected to the usual platitudes about working with or loving artists; the inherent envy within so many people towards artists of talent; and what it would mean for Europe to know Beethoven's inner thoughts.  That a man so revered would give himself utterly to a single other human soul seems insufficient (this line of argumentation, by the way, has long since been the excuse of creative minds whose greatest challenges are faithfulness and commitment).  But as a man without his music, Beethoven was quite ordinary and aware of the difficulties of forging a simple life bereft of the pretense of what he loved most.  That is why when we do get to the most likely candidates, the whole production slips swiftly into the brackenish abyss of melodrama.

Biopics tend to be generous in their portion of fiction, and the identity of the beloved remains to this day a conundrum, a last piece of uncolonized territory in a huge expanse of personal information (further proof for why you should not try to learn history by watching movies).  I suppose I should not be surprised that wave upon wave of enthusiasts would ultimately find Beethoven's personal desires more riveting than his professional ones, simply because, having experienced one and not the other, they can only relate to his life.  For that reason we are bound to labor through documentaries on the "life" of an author spatchcocked with examples from his work, a reduction that ultimately has bolder, sacrilegious implications.  Yet Immortal Beloved is salvaged from a ho-hum disgorgement of familiar topoi by the nature of the subject matter: we are still dealing with one of the greatest music geniuses to have walked the earth.  And if, as this writer claimed, "a man of genius makes no mistakes," as "his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery," then Beethoven's gaffes would have not have led him to this decisive frame of mind.  No, they were all part of the plan from the very beginning, and did I mention the film's end?  No other scene in recent cinematic history features a finer constellation of music and film, a panoply of sense that can only be pulled off by a soundtrack of pure and utter bliss.  Is that the main reason to watch the life of a man who, as a man, was as fallible as any of us, but as a musician at the height of his powers chilled our spine like few others?  Portals of discovery, indeed.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off his translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on .... [and] Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading ... In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remained suspended ... just as the revolt remains suspended, while the conspirators wait in vain to begin it with their illustrious accomplice, and time weighs motionless on the flat shores of Arabia.

If you have never understood modern literary theory, you may consider what precisely there is to understand.  In the last sixty-odd years, in curious coincidence with the end of the most horrific war the world (here to mean Europe, which has always thought of itself as the center of the world) has ever seen, hope in the superfluous beauty of art and its promises was forsaken.  Shortly thereafter came the liberation of numerous nations from the yoke of colonialism and the repeated declaration that arts and the humanities – so casually scorned in the self-anointed center of world culture – have the same merit and dignity whatever the tradition.  Eurocentrism had finally been counteracted with postcolonialism and the relativism that it did not matter who wrote what, because anyone could have written anything (the corollary to this theorem states that innumerable works of art and literature perished or were never able to be created in many former colonial states owing to oppression and bigotry).  Now I in no way wish to belittle the championing of recently decolonized nations' artistic output; on the contrary, they should be encouraged and even lent added appreciation for the troubling times in which they came to be.  That said, destroying the fonts of culture and artistic glory for the semblance of equality is ridiculous and proven to be ridiculous by the mass of European intellectuals who continue both to live in and deride Europe.  Somehow it is easy to criticize one's government and the hypocrisy of one's neighbor towards the misery of others while sipping coffee and chewing on cake at an enchanting little bistro that just so happens to be located in one of the poshest parts of a very European capital. 

Yet frauds of this type have existed since time immemorial; there is another, more serious matter at hand: the destruction of authorship.  You may have heard of theorists who claim that the author is dead, that there is no real original thought, that we may put our names to our books, but these books are simply the amalgamations of countless other books that we have read over a lifetime filtered through our own experiences, precise readings, and, most scarily, our own interpretations of what those books might mean.  The end result is that we are no longer the authors of our own works; we are as much their translators, epigones, and forgers as the people chastised for piggybacking on the success of well-known writers or copying their style for a lack of their own.  The problem with working in such a context is that anything can be anything else; since nothing is absolute, the line on a curtain can be a highway in the desert; a barge upon the Seine can be the smile of an evil face half-shrouded in the gloam; and the floral patterns in your wallpaper can reveal the divine pattern of something unearthly.  And one writer's book can simply be the shadow of another until we are enveloped by a kingdom of darkness, which is much of the premise in this famous novel.

The novel divides into twelve numbered chapters and ten incipit chapters, all of which are sufficiently vague as to underscore the need to be vague, the first being the title of the novel itself.  The goal will be twofold: alternate between a reality involving a person (the Reader), a female love interest and a cast of secondary characters (including a rather bewildering scene at a fictitious university's language department) and the books that these characters happen to encounter, and repeatedly dampen the development of a full novel.  Our protagonist is a Reader who begins as the traveler one winter night and slowly becomes aware of his literary mission, which he abruptly tries to derail; of course, this being a very modern novel, Calvino does not allow him much leeway.  He traipses through, inter alia, the first chapters of a nouveau roman setting, a literary mystery, a novel set in Cimmeria, a work of socialist realism, a novel about a jogging professor terrified of hearing a phone ring, a novel about a billionaire who collects kaleidoscopes – all the while pursuing a woman (Ludmilla) who seems to be the ideal reader and avoiding her sister (Lotaria), who admits that, instead of reading a novel, she uses a computer program to feed her its most frequently used words in order to derive its meaning.  And yet whenever our Reader seems bound to make headway in deciphering his literary world, he is again subjected to a first chapter of a new novel that someone happens to be reading, translating, or forging.  The logic for such an endeavor is explained in Chapter Eight, the longest and best chapter by a certain Silas Flannery, a well-known Irish author who happens to be suffering from the inability to finish a novel:

I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object.  But how could such a book be constructed?  Would it break off after the first paragraph?  Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely?  Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?

The author (ostensibly Flannery) then sets about copying some of the opening lines of this Russian novel, a project he quickly abandons owing to his need to write and not just be a "copyist [living] simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing" – but the likening to the Thousand Nights and One Night has already met its mark.  As Scheherazade's aim is to keep herself alive and instruct the murderous king on morality and art so that he might stop slaying his wives, so is the format of Calvino's novel equally preposterous: a novel that will keep rebooting and recommencing to capture the magic of the incipit and never submit to the litany of additional detail necessary for a novel to sprawl out to its full length. 

Equally notable is the presence of a man called Ermes Marana.  Marana appears and disappears with the ease so commonly found in thrillers about untraceable operatives and unthinkable operations.  Yet by profession he is a translator, which reminds us of an old adage about translators.  He convinces Flannery that Japanese translators have so perfected their renditions of Flannery's novels that they now can write their own which, once translated back into English, cannot be distinguished from the authentic ones (the point being, as it were, that there is no such thing as an "authentic novel" but only an "authorial persona" to which a work is attributed).  Indeed, Marana's dream was "a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches," which is a concept first found in Borges well before any modern theorist turned it into a series of destructive (and ultimately pointless) cons.  That said, there are many superb moments: in one chapter, In a network of lines that enlace, a professor is humiliated by the guilt of having been forward, or having given the impression of wanting to be forward, with one of his students, resulting in a kidnapping, extortion and the phone call that he keeps hearing as a symbol of his guilt; Flannery's diary features a wonderful sequence with a writer staring with a spyglass every morning at a reader across the way, then at another writer, then at another reader who becomes the object of both writers and their desire to mimic the other's style (a novel-length investigation of this fascinating conceit would probably turn into the type of nouveau roman that so enthralled readers in the first twenty-odd postwar years – but that is neither here nor there).  Calvino's novel is painfully self-aware at times but oddly brilliant at others, refusing to endorse any particular framework apart from a suggestion that creation is an awe-inspiring feat that should not remain unrewarded.  So when Flannery, who is the closest thing to Calvino's alter ego in the novel, claims that "readers are my vampires.  I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper," we instinctively lean back – and then we catch ourselves.  Should we really be forced to read this way, or have we always done so and just not realized it?  Somehow I think we'll need more than an opening chapter to make up our minds.

First Stop in the New World

We have become both urban and urbane.  The relationship of those two words, as any old pedant will tell you, has as much to do with technology and society's development as with a persistent snobbery about those who live among strangers, who govern and shrive and housel and judge.  Nature should not be forgotten, and we can learn so many things from naturalists that our schools cannot or would not teach; but it is residing in a community with thousands or millions of others sharing similar goals and opportunities that defines modern existence.  Having spent my life almost entirely in capital cities I have a fondness for the countryside that is, in its essence, both Romantic and unrealistic, and what should be admired about the surroundings in this novella or this novel I may not want to experience for myself.  As the last two centuries have demonstrated, city life can be absolutely fabulous and absolutely miserable, paradise and penury lurking on opposite banks of a river that neither party really intends to cross.  And as our cities have grown, magnificent and proud structures, tributes to man's ingenuity, supremacy and sweat, art has reflected this shift: it has become more self-assured, less deferential, less keen on the mysteries of nature and more focused on the achievement of earth's most evolved species.  This is, for a variety of reasons, good and bad.  The bad consequence of our manmade landscapes is that we have come to believe that there is nothing beyond our grasp, that forests and hills and oceans are unkempt studies for true perfection.  While not all of us are so convinced, we can still revel in fine surveys of some of our more riveting urban sprawls.  One such location would be the former capital of the Aztec empire, now the Mecca of all sorts of empires, none of which seems to be unstinting towards its impoverished minions – which brings us to this recent book.

Mexico City is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, yet few have ventured a study into what makes it tick.  The habitual excuse will likely contain synonyms for "crazy," "unwieldy," "dangerous," and "colonialist," or maybe even those very words, leaving the curious reader who does not have the privilege of visiting quite cold.  As it were, the Distrito Federal (also known as D.F., in the spirit of Americans' D.C.) cannot be categorized as particularly safe, placid or easy to manage; if that's what you want in life, Geneva is still available.  No, D.F. screams tantalizing opportunities, huge disparities in those opportunities, and a certain ability to handle the vicissitudes of urban life that would make most spoiled Westerners quail.  In fact, given the plethora of negative information on Mexico City over the last few decades, there would be hardly an American of non-Mexican heritage that would ever want to consider a life there. 

Yet there are exceptions such as David Lida.  A New Yorker by birth and disposition, Lida has been a resident and proponent of D.F. since 1990 when he moved there after a succession of pleasant short-term stays.  All those years have given him access to changes and persons that would completely escape the casual observer, researcher or intrepid journalist armed with a handful of popular guides and a pocket dictionary.  Lida's knowledge is therefore profound, biased and laced with small chains of detail that could not have possibly occurred to someone unwilling to make a home out of his subject matter.  He bleeds and fights for a place that is not kind to its majority (and oftentimes pernicious to its minority), stubbornly persuaded that Mexico City will be the future.  Whose future is the only question:

People who complain that Mexico City has become agringada [Americanized] are in fact revealing that they never stray beyond the affluent neighborhoods.  However globalized, the city resists becoming the stereotype of a place that has lost its identity or become ruined due to contemporary capitalism.  There are probably many reasons, but the principal one is poverty.  Globalization functions for the middle class and the well-to-do, who increasingly find themselves living, working, and shopping in enclaves modeled after their counterparts in the United States.  The poor cannot afford such places, and globalization passes them by (106).

Unfortunately, there is nothing more commonplace and banal than poverty.  Lida's contribution aims to harpoon the traditional notions of mythic beasts such as postcolonialism, sexism, and the particularly Mexican malinchismo, which may be loosely rendered in English as a preference or prejudice for foreigners and foreign things, by adjusting the chiaroscuro.   Yes, Mexico City is poor (minimum wage is five dollars a day; only twelve percent of the working population earns more than twenty-three dollars a day).  Yes, Mexico City is as corrupt, unsafe and unpredictable as you might expect from a city that has only had non-appointed, elected mayors since 1997.  But what Lida finds is remarkable: he casts his eyes about and discovers the art and food of La Condesa; the vocabulary of death, fate and sexual interaction; the gentle winds that blow in from other nations and their impressions of Mexicans, by most accounts some of the friendliest people in the world.  One remarkable short chapter (there are thirty-three chapters, a tidy, unintentionally Christian number) relates the legend of the Island of the Dolls; another, longer entry surveys Mexico's diverse and brazen culinary combinations; and a lengthy chapter, fittingly the physical center of the book, is devoted to the sex industry at home, work and play.  Perhaps such prurience is unavoidable in our day and age consecrated so unabashedly to hedonism; whatever the explanation, it is not out of place given what the Spaniards accomplished and what we come to think about repressed lusts in countries that will overtly preach the contrary.

Lida may be a journalist accustomed to deadline, but he does not hurry his conclusions.  He admits that he did not immediately understand the complexity of the allusive phrase, "Soy chino libre"; and he has come to see the value of religion (which he clearly does not endorse) and Catholic motifs and rituals.  There is also an artistic touch to so many of his expressions, such as when he describes the inequities of daily existence: "people with money perceive the poor as abstractions, blurs who only come into focus when they wait on them" (29); or when he addresses the city's notorious penchant for gangdom: "Criminologists' explanation for the discrepancy has to do with the chilango's [Mexico City native's] perception of time. When surveyed, victims nearly always believe that the crimes have occurred more recently than they did" (209).  Would you want to read an urban diary whose author was not in love with that city, who wasn't prone to fits of exaggeration, who wouldn't place a charming twist on the most morose and sordid details?  This is neither obstruction nor propaganda, this is love.  When we love, we may espy the faults of our beloved, but we bask in the glory of her advantages, her ecstasies, her passions.  Lida took his time and found almost everything praiseworthy about an ancient city that most dismiss with a careless gesture.  Another chaotic valley of trouble, perched high above even less fortunate warrens of humanity?  That's only one way to look at it.